SayUncle links to a sputtering of one of the anti-gun blogs. Up until about a year ago, there wasn’t any such thing as this phenomena, but after Media Matters encouraged (possibly paid?) people to write about the issue, there have been a few. I always thought it would make things more interesting in the gun blog community if there was more anti-gun bloggers around challenging us, and helping to keep the conversation interesting. Boy was I wrong.

I’ve yet to see an anti-gun blog out there yet that’s not just spewing nasty attacks, arguing against positions none of us hold, or just rambling on incoherently at great length. This is still a one sided conversation. They have turned out to be masters of only the straw man.

You’re right about the nasty attacks, especially with Mike’s cobloggers. The whole cesspit that he calls a blog is a testament to the fact that they are not seriously interested in anything resembling a discussion.

First off, I didn’t say “I” did any of the disproving, so there is a typical failure of precision (awful close to strawman in a forensics sense).

Secondly, astonishingly, your reference post has lots of nice (and hoary) anecdotes but fails to cite to what I like to call “evidence.”

Recall that we start with an individual right to keep and bear arms and that any restrictions on the same have to be legally and ethically justified, not with “well, this might work”, but substantial evidence that they can and/or do work.

The burden is -always- on the proposing restrictor (you) to come up with overwhelming proof to support even the most minor of restrictions, as the default for the exercise of an inalienable right is no restrictions at all on mere acquisition or possession (as opposed to use in violation of other’s rights) under our classically liberal system of government. Those defending the peaceful and lawful exercise of a fundamental right begin with a presumption of correctness (innocence) which the accuser (restrictor) must overcome.

In any event, you do realize that we have hard numbers on where firearms used in crime come from right? That there is no need to speculate or conjecture? All we need to do is look to the DOJ/NIJ and apply logic to their numbers to realize that the restrictions you continue to espouse will have no statistically significant societal effects, even if that could justify infringing a fundamental individual right.

Well, Matthew, you succeeded in one comment to use almost all the buzzwords about the 2A, perhaps you missed god-given and natural-human, but what it really is nowadays is a bastardization of the original intent. The fact that it’s become popular with you zealots and even received the stamp of approval from the best Supreme Court that money can buy doesn’t make it any more valid.

About the numbers that are available as to where crime guns come from, they’re crap. You know why? Because they include a category called “from other criminals.” My four categories are ORIGINAL sources of guns used in crime.

You gotta start thinking for your self a bit, man, and stop repeating the old lines they’ve fed you for years.

Mikey, if that Supreme Court was “bought,” it wasn’t by NRA money. It was by the 68% of the people who support the NRA, not with money but with popular pressure. (Yes, SC’s now and in the past have been swayed by popular pressure).

Mike also joins the other folks on his side of the issue in denying that the reason they lost in Heller and McDonald is a multi-decade historical research project that thoroughly discredited the modern academic re-interpretation of the 2nd Amendment as being a collective one.

So discredited did it become, that not a single justice bought it, with the justices splitting on the extent of the individual right. That the Second Amendment was anything other than what it says, and individual right to keep and bear arms, is now the accepted model based on historical evidence. That wasn’t something our side made up out of thin air, it was decades of painstaking research their side was not able to credibly refute, and it wasn’t for lack of trying.

This is what I mean about debate. There is no debate. The gun control folks are living in a reality of their own construction, that is not a fact or evidence based reality, so how can there be a debate? The first rule of being able to have a debate is acknowledgement of the same reality. When you keep preaching the 2nd Amendment is a collective right, or that the founders didn’t believe in an armed populace, that’s been thoroughly refuted. It’s not a debate anymore among people who accept reality as it is.

They are not interested in debate. Take as evidence any of the known anti-gun bloggers: Baldr’s New Trajectory (no commenting), Japete’s blog (heavy moderation), MikeB302000’s blog (heavy moderation). Need I go on? The other side has to control the argument and suppress opposition or they lose every single time.

Wait, Sebastian, you’ve got me confused with one of the other gun control guys.

“When you keep preaching the 2nd Amendment is a collective right”

I don’t say that. I say the 2A is nothing. It’s totally anachronistic and meaningless in today’s world. It means as little as the 3rd does.

The bastardization of the Second Amendment has been very successful, I grant you. But it won’t last. Look what it’s given us. Intentional homicide rate 4 times greater than the UK. There’s your second amendment. Be proud.

That “it’s anachronistic and meaningless in today’s world” is certainly a valid opinion. Not one I agree with, but it’s a reality based observation. But what this means is that the proper avenue to address that is repeal. The Third Amendment might have been rendered an anachronism by the construction industry (barracks), but the private property right the Third Amendment is meant to protect still very much exist, and should the government decide to quarter troops, the Third Amendment would still be very much actionable through the courts.

While it’s certainly a valid opinion that the Second Amendment can just be ignored, it would make me question what other aspects of the Bill of Rights you believe should be safely ignored, and who gets to make these decisions? Certainly a valid opinion, but far outside the mainstream of public thought in this country.

The problem with your “solutions” is that you have (apparently) not actually thought them through. As always, you seem to stop at the point of “this sounds good” and fail to apply rigorous logic, much less address the ethical and legal issues involved. Instead of paragraphs ending in “discuss”, perhaps you could start from your premise and show the chain of logic on how you expect to get to your solution while self-critically addressing the issues presented to you over and over again. Until you do that it’s hard to take your “same-old, same-old” seriously.

I’ll help get you started. The first hurdle is that there are 300 million plus weapons extant in this country, few if any of which of which can actually be tracked.* We have porous borders north and south, with hundreds of millions of military grade weapons to the south just waiting to be imported even if the extant weapons could be magically made to disappear and your licensing and registration of law-abiding individuals should prove to achieve its goals.

Which it won’t, as is demonstrated by the gun controller’s favorite paradise, England.

England never had a huge gun culture yet their systematic gun control regulations, including draconian licensing, storage requirements, and registration (which led directly to confiscations following tragedies), have not resulted in any drop in “gun crime”, which they had little of (approaching statistical noise) in the first place.

Rather England, an -island- nation, its nearest continental neighbors also having fairly strict gun control, is seeing increased (hell, I’ll accept not decreased) gun crime, little to none of which involves domestically-obtained weapons but instead weapons smuggled in by air, sea, or train. The value of such weapons to criminals is such that they are even converting non-firearms. I’m not saying one caused the other, I’m saying that even the most draconian of schemes, occurring in a small nation with negligible private gun ownership compared to the US, and located on an actual island, simply didn’t work as a crime control measure due to economics and the persistence of criminals.

But we, the USA, -do- have a large number of extant, untraceable guns, and long open land borders with countries comparatively awash in weapons. We also know for a fact that, at least with our current state of Constitutional jurisprudence and political reality, we can’t effectively stop either people in the thousands or drugs in the hundreds of tons from crossing those borders with impunity, so unless your “solutions” can account for them and also the fundamental economic problem that scarcity creates value and thus incentive to smuggle, your “solutions” founder on the rocks of logic.

That of course ignores the massive changes to our entire theory of Justice, including rewriting extant 4th Amendment law, your “solutions” would require for implementation.

And I realize all you have is name calling but I’d appreciate you not insulting me by saying I’m merely parroting talking points. What I’ve done (all my life, on every topic) like a lot of other rational people, is apply fundamental logical reasoning to reality; that something is obvious to a lot of people who have done that doesn’t mean they didn’t get there themselves.

I’ve long past looked at your “solutions”, which are neither “yours” nor novel (they were old when I was young), and found them wanting on a host of levels. You have yet to address the fundamental structural, economic, legal, ethical etc, etc, problems with taking those played-out ideas from the page to the ground that keep getting pointed out to you. You simply ignore those issues and keep trotting out the same old chestnuts asking for “discussion.” Again, the burden is on you, the proposing restrictor of a right, to go from theory to application (to include the final point of contact between Officer Friendly and Joe Gunowner) to defend your “ideas” as rational, realistic, necessary alternatives to the status quo.

* note even Canada, without a 2nd Amendment or large and vocal pro-gun-rights population, couldn’t get anywhere near 100% compliance with its limited goal of a long gun registry which, like every registration scheme, ballistic or otherwise, in our own country, turned out to be a useless boondoggle in the end

I recently attended a Q&A for a musician named Serj Tankian who touched on this subject as well. After the Q&A I also decided to look at some of his music videos and he is very politically, environmentally and socially aware. Here is one of his music videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQtRXqBQETA I think you would enjoy. His new album “Harakiri” just came out, Best Buy is doing something where it’s $8 (http://bit.ly/BBcoupon) but I guess it still doesn’t beat $4 on Amazon